Body Defiance, Amplify’s next Generator Grant exhibition, reveals gender in its knotty mix of cultural norms, historical formations, family influence, and psychic realities constantly made and remade. 

Exhibition artists and organizers Ang Bennett and Sheree Le’Shawn, both assigned female at birth (AFAB), document their shared experiences as Black, AFAB people asserting bodily autonomy outside the binary. Their collaborative photo and video work traces the daily ritual of enacting gender, and its multiplicities, in the repressive and often hostile political landscape of the Midwest.  

Itself a document of this time and this place, the exhibition deploys gender as a process of emergence that is crafted, cultivated, and reproduced over time. In doing so, Body Defiance avows the power of queer self-determination to challenge legislative assaults on the rights of LGBTQ2+ people and expose the democratically prescribed conditions of freedom, equality, and justice for some, not all.

Free and open to all. Face masks are not required but always welcome. Exhibition viewings after the opening are by appointment. Please register in Eventbrite or email peter@amplifyarts.org to schedule a time to visit outside of regular gallery appointment hours.  

• Exhibition Dates: July 14th - August 18th, 2023

• Opening Reception: July 14th; 6pm - 9pm

• Screening: August 11th; 7pm - 8pm 

• Regular Gallery Hours: Thursdays and Fridays; 1pm - 5pm by appointment

Generator Grant programming is presented with support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.